Stanley Kubrick's 2001 (1968) and Ridley Scott's Alien (1979) offer the yin and yang of realism in science fiction film. 2001 depicts space travel as the highest refinement of engineering and design, a perfect blend of function and delight down to the last Olivier Mourgue armchair. Every polished bulkhead, every user interface, has a backstory of meticulous real-world research and development by brilliant minds. The crew, too, are superlative professionals – postdoctoral, capable, preternaturally calm. Locked in final struggle with the silicon intelligence that has killed all his colleagues, Dr David Bowman (Keir Dullea) doesn't even raise his voice.

In Scott's Alien, whatever design virtuosity the doomed ship Nostromo once exhibited has been lost in the course of years of slapdash maintenance. The crew are underpaid and underwashed. Everything from the high technology to the food and industrial relations is dysfunctional. The entire film is one long workplace accident (the sequel even opens with the ensuing paperwork). Alien is dirty SF; 2001 is clean. They are both, xenomorphs and monoliths aside, very like reality, but seen from different sides.

The science fiction artwork of Chris Foss is a consistent synthesis of these two perspectives. Foss' career began at the tail end of the 1960s, after 2001 but before Alien. He had seen Kubrick's Odyssey and it had left him deeply impressed, by its colour and stark grandeur, a stark contrast to drab, ramshackle postwar London. By the time Alien came along a decade later, Foss had completely reshaped the look of science fiction – indeed, he was a visual designer for the film, leaving after Scott took over as director. Rian Hughes, introducing this comprehensive collection of Foss' art, calls the Foss aesthetic "the defining template for how we picture the hardware of tomorrow".

Foss' medium was book covers, hundreds of them. The cover of a science fiction novel has particular tasks – it is, more so than non-genre fiction, an entrée for the imagination, which gives a foretaste of the promised banquet for the mind's eye. Still, they are often formulaic, and then and now similar sleek spaceships firing lasers appear time and time again. But Foss' spaceships are different – not simply a different breed, they are all different from one another. He took the inverted challenge of designing for unknown technologies in a vacuum and produced a mind-boggling array of unlikely shapes for his space vehicles. There are a few pointy rockets in Hardware, but also spheres, wasp-waisted peanuts, deep-sea bivalves, flying wedges, steel blimps, stacks of boxes and much else besides. These are given fabulous black-and-bold zebra stripes or checks and smatterings of illegible script; they drift through surrealist starscapes, over tropical alien landscapes or above equally outlandish city skylines.

But despite their often bizarre appearance, Foss spaceships are characterised by an evolved realism that makes them uncanny and memorable. Their details are authentic and confident; each vent, antennae and stencilled warning looks completely at home in a wildly unfamiliar form governed by unknown constraints. So many of these ships look properly lived in, not fresh off the slipway like Kubrick's fleet – cables hang loose, dirt is building up in the cracks, paint looks reapplied. Some ships appear barely functional, skeletal survivors of forever wars. The imagination rushes in to provide stories for these vehicles; they look as if they've been places.

The same aesthetic is evident in Foss' work for submarine thrillers and Second World War stories, where the technology should be more familiar. His helicopters are curiously over-decorated, his battleships suspiciously top-heavy with radomes and missile clusters. His aesthetic is a kind of eye for the inaesthetic – the pragmatic, mysterious shapes that coalesce when practical or engineering concerns are all that matters – which he draws out and labours. You can see completely Fosslike forms in the vehicles at work in our own world: the ungainly skyscraper slabs of ocean-going container-haulers, the dinosaur hunch and maw of South American stripmining machines, the inscrutable Sant'Elia towers, domes and gantries of warships, the origami profiles of radar-defying fighter planes finessed by supercomputers. Foss can see the poetry of the machine. He understands the unnatural shape of things. Hardware is a magnificent tribute to an extraordinary artist.

It was a busy Saturday afternoon in Brighton city centre, and I was on my way to rob a bank. I had my mobile phone, an accomplice, and his mobile phone. Standing opposite Barclays bank, we gazed at each other and stood with phones clamped to our ears, poised for action. I could press one to continue or two if I wasn't ready. We signalled to each other, then touched our keypads.

This was the climax of A Machine To See With, a pervasive game by interactive media artist group Blast Theory which put participants on the streets among unsuspecting members of the public, appropriating the surroundings as the props and backdrop for its storyline. It was a fictitious thriller played in real time on the high street; a bank heist by numbers.

Three hours before starting A Machine To See With, I got a phonecall instructing me to be outside the Brighton Toy and Model Museum at 3.15pm with a fully charged phone and some cash. I was an avatar in what followed, a remote-controlled machine to see with, obeying automated commands on my phone, confirming my progress by selecting certain options the system offered. Being on my phone kept me slightly removed from my surroundings, a little apart from the shoppers, tourists and boisterous stag parties. Then, in the toilets of a pub, my judgement and instincts were brought into play as I answered questions about what kind of bank robber I was. Selecting option two rather than three was all that would define me. I might sometimes take the lead in tricky situations in real life, but I would have to at all times in this game, as that was the option selected. This live action Choose Your Own Adventure game was now complicated by the added personality test.

At the top of the car park, I had to find an unlocked silver BMW then sit in the driver's seat and wait for a tap on the window. Shit just got real; this was interaction with non-game objects, real places and people; they were part of the game, although they appeared not to be playing at all. Juggling these realities was challenging, thrilling; when another player tapped hesitantly on the window and got into the car with me, it became clear how many other realities were present. There was a different pre-recorded voice guiding him; he was told to look at me the same moment my automated message told me to look at him. We exchanged brief words, decided to work together, and nervously went downstairs to rob the bank.

We didn't rob it. At the crucial moment, I was told to turn away. My accomplice had already disappeared. Did we really think we would? the voice asked. I couldn't answer as there was no option to express myself. More commands came: go to the games arcade near the seafront, then find someone among the garish, coin-operated machines, and give them my money. I selected an option, finger quivering, and listened to my final damning message. Then the line went dead, and I looked around, dazed. There were people on their phones, all plugged into a removed reality as I had been, perhaps playing a game in which they too negotiated the streets as if pieces in a board game. We were complicit. These strangers not making eye contact or watching where they were going were, for that moment, my friends. I was a machine, seeing things differently.

A Machine To See With, Blast Theory. Brighton Digital Festival, 2011

Image

A Machine To See With

Words

Hazel Tsoi-Wiles

It was a fictitious thriller played in real time on the high street; a bank heist by numbers

In the early 1960s, the future had wheels and a sleek chrome exterior. "She's real fine my 409. Well, I saved my pennies and I saved my dimes," swooned Brian Wilson. In 1963, the year that the Beach Boys released their automobile-ode album Little Deuce Coupe, a little-known artist named Andy Warhol was commissioned by Harper's Bazaar to illustrate the phenomenon that was the American motorcar. It may have been the same year that Warhol silk-screened a tabloid shot of a car crash, but his repeated views of a Cadillac for Harper's were nothing short of celebratory.

A year later, Harper's gave the same brief and access to that year's dream machines to an emerging photographer named Lee Friedlander. Friedlander, however, had little interest in automobiles, and much to the horror of the magazine's editors, it showed: in his series The New Cars there were no drivers, no beautiful women in passenger seats, no open roads. Instead, Chryslers, Pontiacs and Cadillacs were abandoned by kerbs, obscured by adverts and garden ornaments, or lost in reflections. Friedlander's covert mission – "to put the cars out in the world, instead of on a pedestal" – proved too much for Harper's and for 40 years his unpublished photographs remained in a box in the archives.

At the Timothy Taylor gallery, these charming, playful experiments have been excavated and are shown alongside Friedlander's more recent series, America by Car – the product of numerous road trips in rental cars that the photographer has made over the past 15 years. Both bodies of work scrutinise the American landscape, both have the same nonchalant air about them, both delight in disorientation and fragmentation. But when it comes to their perspective, they are opposites. In his 1964 series, a pavement-bound Friedlander hunted down the most obtuse way of photographing a car without really photographing it, against a backdrop of anonymous suburban hinterlands. In comparison, American by Car offers the full nationwide panorama – city skylines, roadside nowheres, desert and mountain expanses – but this time from the driver's seat. In these, Friedlander makes a feature out of the interior, with pristine dashboards and doors looming large in the foreground, and the car's hulking metal structure fashioned into an imposing sculptural form that dominates almost every photograph. If it wasn't for the fact that most of the exterior landscapes seem as if they're stuck in the 60s (a few Obama placards can be spied, but largely the roadside signs that catch Friedlander's eye are of the run-down Walker Evans kind), these images could almost be mistaken for contemporary car ads. But, just as Friedlander upended the idea of the street photographer as a mythic hero with his 1970s self-portraits of shadows and reflections, here he takes a cheeky swipe at the concept of the legendary road trip (many of the photos in Robert Frank's infamous 1958 state of the nation book The Americans possess a similar casual, drive-by feel to them, but never does Frank's car protrude into the frame).

The best images in America by Car are the most claustrophobic ones – those where Friedlander takes full advantage of the conflicting framing opportunities and unusual angles offered by windscreens, wing-mirrors and windows. In these, buildings, signs and horizons collide and are warped by the square format and the cram-everything-in lens of his Hasselblad Super Wide, a camera he only began using in the 1990s. In contrast, the simpler compositions of The New Cars may not be as visually zingy, but Friedlander's quieter shots of cars positioned haphazardly by bland grass verges or piles of used tyres are just as powerful and irreverent as his complex layerings of street and interior spaces.

In America by Car, there's the sense that the automobile is a cocoon, utterly divorced from the outside world, but with such a multitude of different locations on view through the windscreen, any sense of social commentary is diluted. The New Cars, meanwhile, offers an abundance of formal charms, but also a much more concentrated critique of the bland suburban landscape that the car has perpetuated. Here, the promise of freedom on four wheels is nowhere to be found.

For a good while now, Iain Sinclair has come across as a London Olympics Nimby. In Ghost Milk he argues that, if the event is going to go ahead at all, then it should be like the 1951 Festival of Britain — for which he stains the page with a few teardrops of nostalgia on behalf of his eight-year-old self; it should be in the heart of London, not on its toxic fringes. On whose behalf is he bemoaning the loss of the area in Stratford to the Olympics? Dog walkers, cyclists, photographers, some allotment holders and the occasional psychogeographer? It's not an especially huge constituency.

But it's with the following decontextualised statement that his animus becomes simply ludicrous: "And I repeat this mantra: Berlin 36, Mexico City 68, Munich 72. Count the cost. Heap up the dead." It is almost as if he wants something to go seriously wrong. Later he remarks that the Olympics Games are war by other means.

The looseness of Sinclair's definition of grand projects undermines his argument. These encompass, for example, the Midland Hotel in Morecambe, the Earth Centre in Doncaster, Manchester's Urbis, the Acropolis Museum and even San Quentin prison. He admits that Will Alsop's M62 SuperCity was a non-starter, but that doesn't stop him complaining about it all the way by bus from Liverpool to Hull on his Hackney Freedom Pass. There is no consideration of the numerous grand projects in the cities he visits that have worked out quite well – his meanderings and musings merely reveal a confirmation bias.

Sinclair unearths some unlikely little nuggets, such as American actress Jayne Mansfield opening the Chiswick flyover in 1959. But he can't help but connect this to his mentor JG Ballard, who crashed his car there more than a decade later. I found the threading through of Ballard problematic. On the surface it would appear that he is memorialising the late writer, but actually Ballard's life is evoked more in relation to Sinclair's own mythology.

For all the brickbats that Sinclair aims at the 2012 Olympics and its legacy, I rather think it's his own legacy that he's more interested in. There's even a visit to Sinclair's own archive (he sold it to the Harry Ransom Center for humanities research in Texas).

One senses that there is still a frustrated fiction writer inside, unable to get out. Despite his huge literary cachet, he still ends up complaining about the amount of money he's owed for his journalism (£12,000, in case you're wondering) and how he hasn't got the time to chase it up. What he rather high-mindedly calls "a piece for the Audi Channel" is in reality a 20-minute advert he and Chris Petit produced for a £60,000 sports car.

Sinclair has a good eye and ear, and a vast descriptive talent (the London 2012 logo is a "bubblegum swastika", Anish Kapoor's Olympic sculpture is the Angel of the North's "twisted caliper"), but his free-association prose-poetry (O2 becomes "Oz" and the A580 becomes "Asbo") and his world-weariness can become tiresome. Even London's Austerity Olympics of 1948 are, in the long run, merely "tramping the ground flat for Westfield".

We can all get worked up about the hucksters and boosters despoiling east London's frontier territory, but the idea of circuses to go with our bread endures and means something. What Sinclair really hates, of course, is that most people are on the side of the Duke of Edinburgh, who saw – from his helicopter vantage over the Lea Valley – "a pretty average mess".

For Sinclair, the smoking gun of the Olympics folly is that "Stratford City will be the largest retail-led mixed regeneration in the UK. In other words: a shopping mall."

Ghost Milk would have been so much better as a concentrated attack in the way Sorry Meniscus was on the Dome – a grenade lobbed into New Labour and its millennial hubris. Instead, it's a baggy mishmash of recycled journalism held together by an unsupported thesis.

Hal Foster is a celebrated critic, a Princeton professor and part of a generation of art writers (along with fellow October magazine editors Rosalind Krauss, Yves-Alain Dubois and Benjamin Buchloh) that inspired me when I began writing about architecture about 12 years ago. At the time, there was little truly critical writing in our field, and even less about the masters of the universe who would become today's "starchitects". Hal Foster was a journalist, and wove together an academic's knowledge of critical theory with a style that allowed his work a broader audience. Design and Crime (2002) is, to me, a classic – full of well-aimed barbs at the collapse of high and low culture into marketing in the 1990s.

His latest book, The Art-Architecture Complex, examines territory that he might reasonably feel to be his own: the interplay between 20th-century art and the spaces within which it has existed since the final years of that century. The book is a collection of essays (most of which have previously appeared in journals and magazines) that more or less hangs together. The first half is devoted to individual critiques of architects Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, Renzo Piano, Zaha Hadid, Diller Scofidio & Renfro and Herzog & de Meuron. The second half looks at artists Richard Serra, Anthony McCall and Dan Flavin, among others. The architects are chosen because they do a lot of museums and galleries; the artists because their work relates to space – they create pieces that might be described as architectural, but stop short of the "experiential". (Foster stops only just short of dismissing James Turrell, Olafur Eliasson and Bill Viola as kitsch.)

In terms of its architectural commentary, the book is less than agenda-setting, and I'm sure there are few Icon readers who need convincing about some of the common critiques. Hal says his namesake Norman Foster's work "delivers an architectural image of a present that wishes to appear advanced", that Foster's work is super-neo-modernism, and that he has few ethical scruples when it comes to business. On Zaha Hadid, he opines that the vectors she uses to generate plans like that of MAXXI in Rome are "arbitrary", and remarks that the buildings she describes as "frozen motion" are more frozen than in motion. His most sophisticated architectural critique is reserved for Renzo Piano – he deftly demolishes the architect's claims of an "organic" architecture, and nails the "global style" of the Foster/Rogers/Piano axis as "banal cosmopolitanism": a phrase taken from German sociologist Ulrich Beck.

The problem with the book is not so much that we've heard these things before – it's always good to hear an establishment figure having a go at these powerful, universally celebrated architects. The problem is that in bringing a linear, author-focused attitude to architecture, his critique is stranded in abstract, art history. I didn't find a single mention of the city, of public life, of the street or of any of the things that surround the buildings he looks at. To Foster, buildings by these architects are isolated artworks, and their meanings are to be found in an analysis of what's there, played off against authorial intent. For him, the great duality is between architects concerned with "surface", which he sees as a postmodern phenomenon, and those concerned with "structure", which is a modern one. For him, all the buildings he looks at have interests on a sliding scale between surface and structure, as if these were two immutable categories. It leads him to a selective reading of the only great architect in his book: Herzog & de Meuron. Foster's selection of their projects foregrounds their admittedly profound interest in surfaces and facades. But, really, buildings like the Eberswalde Technical School Library (1994-97) in Germany are marginal works in their journey from Rossi-influenced Swiss contextualists to purveyors of cultural liquorice allsorts around the world. There is no place in Foster's writing for any reflections on the Stone House in Italy, and the other early projects that established Herzog & de Meuron as a practice with more profound interests than its peers. For Foster, the firm's work derives from a "minimalist-pop dialectic", but this sells short the influence of the architects' teacher Aldo Rossi, and their understanding of the city as a collage of archetypes.

It seems pointless to write a book about architecture that does not mention the city once. There is no understanding evinced of what public life might be, and how architecture tries or fails to provide a setting for it. For Foster, walking around must be like experiencing a series of decodable images, with functional spaces behind them. The Art-Architecture Complex gently debunks the reputations of a series of ageing architects who probably don't give a damn what anybody thinks any more, while offering little to the rest of us.

The Art-Architecture Complex. Hal Foster. Verso Books, £20

Image

Iwan Baan

Words

Kieran Long

It seems pointless to write a book about architecture that does not mention the city once. There is no understanding [of] how architecture tries or fails to provide a setting for public life

The Hemswell bottle recycling plant in Lincolnshire is the largest facility of its kind in Europe – and will soon be the biggest in the world. It processes half the plastic bottles collected for recycling in the UK. Kieran Long visits a hidden world and wonders how 21st-century factories like this will shape the cities of the future.

Hemswell, Lincolnshire is an abandoned airfield just off the A15. There is an audible hum in the air and a lone forklift zips backwards and forwards between a truck and a cavernous warehouse. Next to a field of high corn, another portal-framed supershed is under construction, a massive building site with very few workers on it.

This series of sheds processes half of all the bottles collected for recycling in the UK: 100,000 tonnes of them a year. Soon that will expand to 145,000 tonnes per year, making it without question the largest bottle sorting plant in the world. It is strategically located (near the centre of the country), high tech and profitable. It is the green economy – that politician's cliche – for real.

Vince Cable, the business secretary, recently betrayed his naivety about UK manufacturing, and what making things really means. He visited Jaguar Land Rover, and was impressed by how "clean, sophisticated, highly-skilled and gender neutral" the production lines were, an unthreatening vision of how manufacturing doesn't need to hurt, and won't offend anyone. It's just like an office job, he wanted to say.

He should go to Hemswell. Here, the overlapping, stacked conveyor lines that sort and process the bottles make for a noisy, dirty, hot place. Everything vibrates. It is certainly extremely sophisticated, and jobs here are skilled, but it's not pretty. Sweaty looking guys hang from speeding conveyor belts monitoring, unblocking and unhooking ("video tape, it's a nightmare that stuff," the boss says to me as he curses an obsolete technology that interferes with the machines). There is a sickly sweet smell in the air, a consequence of the residue from millions of bottles. It's how I imagine death in a hot country smells, or that lily in Kew Gardens that only opens once a year and reeks of rotting flesh.

I've visited car plants all over Europe, and you can see why they are the poster boys for manufacturing as far as politicians are concerned. They produce very luxurious goods. Yes, people have to get into debt to buy them, and they fuck up cities and the environment, but their factories look great, and the machines look like the Mark 1 Terminator.

The building is a former aircraft hangar

Hemswell bottle sorting plant is manufacturing, but it feels more like mining than making. Recycling plastic on this scale is like exploiting a natural resource. Humans have sucked all the oil out of the North Sea, and now it circulates around the world in the form of plastic bottles and margarine tubs.

This geyser of plastic was untapped until Eco Plastics managing director Jonathan Short, like a prospector, began to think of ways to marshal it. He used to work in scrap metal, so for him, there's gold in the things we waste. He persuaded manufacturers and supermarkets to install balers to compress plastic waste into large cubes that are efficient to transport. He hired a former aircraft hangar in Lincolnshire and imported machinery from Germany to put in it.

The machinery that is the star of the show. Two sorting lines hoist the deconstructed bales up high into the rafters on conveyors, and then the gravity-assisted sorting process begins. The speed is astonishing. The plastics bottles are spread out on broad conveyors travelling at high velocity, and they enter what are known as "ballistic separators". This is a glorious name for an amazing machine. A camera uses infra-red light to examine the bottles as they pass beneath it, and in a millisecond detects which polymer it is made of. The bottles that are "positively selected" (in the first case, valuable polyethylene terephthalate – PET – is made back into food-grade quality plastic pellets) are blown upwards by tiny, high-pressure nozzles, controlled by the information from the camera. These are caught by another conveyor belt. The "negatively selected" plastic drops downwards onto another conveyor, and goes through this process again.

The outcome of this massive, computer controlled meccano set is huge containers of separated materials. PET and "Jazz PET" (industry jargon for coloured PET) are cleaned and recycled on site, while many other products (including high-density polyethylene, polypropylene, PVC, films and other plastics, steel and aluminium cans and paper from labels) are separated and sold for reprocessing. Paper is sent to waste-to-energy plants.

The PET goes into an adjoining, steam-filled warehouse, where it is shredded, further filtered – any tiny flake of metal or other plastic affects the quality of the final product – repeatedly cleaned, then melted in heat and vacuum reactors. One of the shocks of my visit was entering the room where this final process takes place, and seeing on the floor huge, globular pieces of blue-ish plastic that were dead ringers for something from Jerszy Seymour's Scum installation. These strange plastic pieces were far from a conceptual design project: they are just the casual waste product of this epic exercise in waste management.

Is this place all function? Not quite. The machines whizzing all this plastic around are blue, and you do get a choice, Short says. After all, bespoke machinery of this kind is not exactly mass produced. "You could have it pink if you wanted," he says, although he seems to me like the last man who would ever choose pink for this job. Stadler, the German firm that makes the machinery, has delivered green ones to a facility in Italy. "A green recycling plant ... I think that's just a bit cheesy. Blue looks cleaner for longer, so we chose blue," he explains in his characteristic clipped style. All the associated machines are also blue, including the cherry pickers and other mobile machinery – a kind of neutral uniform. It's a choice that places function over rhetoric.

The potential of this young industry is thrilling, and potentially endless. It must – and will – become a part of the way we think about cities and urban development. This year's expansion will mean that Eco Plastics is responsible for 70 percent of the country's production of recycled PET. As facilities like this get larger, will they spawn their own towns around them, the green economy version of Yorkshire pit towns? What would they look like? Can architecture and design play a role in making us as proud of facilities like this, as we should be?

Short wants to dispel myths about recycling in the sceptical UK. It really does happen, he says. The plastic you put in your recycling bins is not being buried or sitting in warehouses with nowhere to go. We have the capacity with our existing infrastructure to increase plastic recycling and we have the places where it can go to be processed. The material doesn't have to decline in quality as it passes through the cycle – food-grade plastic is made here – and there is ample demand, as proven by Eco Plastics' recent supply deal with Coca Cola.

Finally, Brits don't need to go to Germany or Scandinavia to see leading-edge recycling technology. We have it here already.

The process separates the plastic into huge containers

Words

Kieran Long

Images

Peter Guenzel

There's a sickly sweet smell in the air, a consequence of the residue from millions of bottles

Trailblazing Danish practice BIG is building a ski park on top of a waste-to-energy plant in Copenhagen – and the incinerator blows laser-lit smoke rings. It's making an ugly but necessary building attractive without making it invisible.

Do a Google image search for “waste-to-energy plants” and this is what you get: an uninspiring selection of boxy buildings sprawled over green landscapes, white fumes escaping from slender cigarette-like smokestacks and clunky cross-sectional diagrams that attempt to explain the workings of these industrial behemoths. Usually banished to the periphery of our cities, waste-to-energy plants – of which there are 431 in Europe and 89 in the US – do the dirty but essential job of incinerating our non-recyclable household rubbish and turning it into useful energy for electricity and heating.

But, since January this year, a new image has joined the search results – a dreamy, almost utopian, set of renders by Bjarke Ingels' practice BIG for its competition-winning proposal to build a waste-to-energy plant 3km outside Copenhagen. Planned to start on site in January 2012 and complete in 2016, the plant will encompass a 31,000sq m rooftop ski park and a chimney that puffs out one smoke ring for every 200kg of carbon dioxide emitted. It is an ambitious but brilliant proposal that is typical of BIG's ability to tear up the rule book and radically change our perceptions of what a building should be and do.

Energy company Amagerforbrænding picked BIG as the winner of the competition that started out as an unadventurous brief to build a new shell around the site's existing plant. “The challenge of this competition was to make a big factory beautiful,” explains Ingels. “And we thought that rather than just wrap it in beautiful wrapping – we would turn the entire plant into a gift for the citizens of Copenhagen. What would have otherwise been a big factory that would block the view and cast shadows on the neighbours becomes a public park.”

Denmark has the climate for skiing, but not the topography of its Scandinavian neighbours. The artificial ski park will comprise three trails for different abilities, as well as a mogul slope and a nursery slope. Snowflex, a system that uses moisture and traction to simulate real snow, will make the slopes usable all year round. Skiers will reach the top of the park using an internal elevator: a vertical promenade through the workings of the plant.

“The brief actually requested a visitor centre, a place to take the school kids to show them how waste turns into power,” Ingels says. “But you only go to a place like that once, and when your teacher tells you to. We wanted the plant to become a destination in itself. Normally the construction of a power plant downtown would be met with Nimbyism – in this case we are getting letters from people asking when they can expect to clip on their skis.”

At 100m tall, the smokestack of the existing Amagerforbrænding waste-to-energy plant is comparable in height to the spires of Copenhagen City Hall and the Christiansborg parliament building. As a visible indicator of the plant's newfound civic purpose, BIG's design introduces a playful disc-shaped chimney mouth to the stack that fills up with smoke emitted by the incinerator and blows a ring over the skies of Copenhagen.

Lit at night by heat-tracking lasers, the rings will serve as a constant reminder of the need to reduce waste. “The idea is to turn the chimney, the symbol of the factory, but also the symbol of pollution, into something playful,” says Ingels. “But more importantly, one of the main drivers of behavioural change is knowledge. If people don't know they can't act. When this plant has been realised, I'll be able to tell my kids that once they've counted five smoke rings, we will have emitted one tonne of carbon dioxide.”

For lead architect David Zahle, the project is not just about the ambitious rebranding of one plant to give it a new identity – it's about taking the whole building typology out of the hands of industry and reclaiming it as a part of architecture. “Factories were high fashion in the industrial era,” he says.

“But over the last 100 years, they've become more and more neglected. As environmental issues came back on to the agenda in the 1970s, big energy companies started caring again about how their buildings looked, so during the 1980s and 1990s a lot of factories were more like sculptures than buildings.”

BIG isn't the only high-profile architect that has been enticed recently to take on the huge blank canvas of a power plant. Thomas Heatherwick's biomass power station in Teesside was given planning permission in March 2010. Like BIG's plant, he attempts to integrate the height of the smokestack into one landform – lavish renders portray it as a gleaming volcano-like chimney, emerging from a mound covered in vegetation.

Grimshaw, meanwhile, took a more straightforward tack in designing a waste-to-energy plant for Suffolk (approved in August this year): the main volume of his building is essentially an elegant and functional box that puts all the processes of plant on show and houses an energy education centre.

Over the next ten years, many more of these designs will get the go-ahead, driven by legislative changes that encourage reduction in carbon emissions and pressure on landfill sites. It's an exciting time for the typology, as it at last receives the attention of the architectural profession's elite and the kind of funding that had previously been channelled into museums or galleries.

Ingels says: “It's a question of expanding the social potential of the urban infrastructure. The billion dollar investments that go into waste management, water treatment, power production, urban mobility ... they don't have to be restricted to be highway overpasses that scar the landscape and create wastelands beneath them. They could be designed in ways that are more symbiotic to the human activities around, above and beneath them.”

The hopeful, romantic images of the Amagerforbrænding plant depict it as a multi-purpose model of industry, education, recreation, sustainability, civic importance and architectural beauty. However, romantic imagery is all we have to go on at the moment – for BIG, the hard work in making their bright idea come to fruition now begins.

As the maverick among the set of pioneers exploring this new architectural territory, BIG's adventurous attitude comes from a firm belief that great ideas can only come from pushing our existing knowledge to its limits. “Our buildings look different because they perform differently, respond to different conditions ... and exploit different potentials,” says Ingels. “The new plant is an example of the idea that sustainability is not a burden, but can improve our quality of life.”

Words

Riya Patel

Factories were high fashion in the industrial era, but over the last 100 years they have become neglected

Behold the "spime": a new way of thinking about objects that presents them as immortal, evolving data rather than just physical, disposable stuff. It's an idea that could help save the world. We go in search of the meaning of spimes, with a little help from their creator, Bruce Sterling.

I'm supposed to be talking to Bruce Sterling about spimes but all I can think about is the stuff in my apartment. There's mounds of it. I've been meaning to organise it since I moved, but I haven't had time and things are piling up. This has a lot to do with how things accumulate if you aren't careful.

Sterling might also be a little distracted. He's in Austin, and Texas is currently on fire. "It hasn't rained seriously here in central Texas for about a year," he tells me. "Everything is flammable; we've got fire indexes that are off the scale." This has a lot to do with the changing climate.

Both of our situations have a lot to do with the future of design.

In 2005, Sterling wrote a book called Shaping Things. It begins like this: "To Whom is Ought to Concern: This book is about created objects and the environment, which is to say, it's a book about everything. Seen from a sufficient distance, this is a small topic."

Shaping Things is a manifesto for a different kind of sustainability, written partially in opposition to an environmentalist approach that Sterling calls "hairshirt green". The book is organised around spimes, a neologism that Sterling invented especially for the occasion. "The idea about spimes is that the killer app of ubiquitous computing is sustainability," Sterling says. "Maybe it is and maybe it isn't. There's nothing fated there, I'm just pointing out in this book that it might be."

Spimes are a hypothetical future designed entity, consisting primarily of data. They may be instantiated as an object from time to time, but physical things are never their native form. You can catch a glimpse of what that might be like in the way modern offices deal with documents.

Documents used to be precious. Scrolls were jealously guarded by monks and scholars. Valuable tomes were literally chained to desks. Today, recycling bins sit near most desks, ready to accept reams of crumpled paper. These lost libraries aren't mourned. The real action is on the computer. A document opened in a word processor is more real than its temporary physical instantiation. The fall of the physical document coincides with the rise of composition and layout software, paired with inexpensive printing hardware.

The pitch for spimes is that the forces that dethroned the scroll are coming for objects. Contemporary rapid prototyping tools still aren't very good, but neither were dot-matrix printers. They got better. Desktop fabrication is getting cheaper and more capable on a monthly basis. The falling transistor prices that make powerhouse laptops affordable are making simple sensors and chips so cheap that you buy them by weight. These, in turn, enable powerful locative applications and the successors to UPC. This opens up the possibility that every object ever made will have a unique addressable identity. Meanwhile, mobile computing is rapidly becoming ubiquitous.

How rapidly? "Fast enough to blow up Hewlett Packard and Nokia in a matter of months," Sterling says. "Fast enough that the mobile space is a bloodbath. It's a whirlpool of creative destruction."

Sterling specifies six things that must exist for there to be spimes.

One: Small, cheap unique identification systems, along with the infrastructure to read it, something like RFID.

Two: A way of precisely locating the object on earth, such as GPS.

Three: Search functionality that gives a front end to the enormous amounts of data that the object is constantly collecting.

Four: Some kind of CAD tool or tools that allow objects to be easily created and manipulated.

Six: Material that is easy to work withand highly transformable that can be cheaply returned to the production process as raw material when the object it was briefly is no longer wanted.

We live in a material culture that exceeds in the mass production and distribution of objects. Logistic systems have globalised the effort. Factories have been smeared across the planet. Logistics people have had to become very good at tracking objects from component factory, to assembly, to warehouse, to retail point of sale.

Then, the strangest thing happens. Suddenly, the object disappears. Aside from brief blips of information if a user bothers to send in the registration card or file a warranty claim, the object is gone, only to reappear as part of a pile of undifferentiated stuff being dumped into a landfill. In this milieu, the discipline of design has thrived, though its focus has always been about the production of things, not the disposal. "We've never come to terms with the garbage," Sterling says. "Capitalism never gets it about entropy."

Let's return to my apartment for a moment. It's full of stuff, probably thousands of objects, and I'm barely even sure of what's there. This is a stressful situation. I need to do something about it and clear all of that junk out. I can't do this blindly; I need to spend time sorting through it all and making decisions about what to keep, what to toss, what to recycle, and what to give away. I sure hope whatever these objects are, they were worth it when I got them, because they have filled my space and are now robbing me of time.

Meanwhile, my laptop knows with great precision the exact location of every file and folder on its hard drive. It's barbaric that my house doesn't have a similar inventory of its contents. How can we have cradle to grave (or cradle to cradle) design if we don't know where an object is for most of its life cycle? We can't. It's a bad joke.

The stuff in my room has only the most rudimentary identity. It is mute matter, imposing itself on me and my loved ones. Instead, imagine if it was as thoroughly knowable as a file on my disk drive. I wouldn't need to sort through all that stuff because a catalogue would be generating entries automatically in real time. Decision-making could be streamlined by any number of apps (instead of Diskcleanup, Deskcleanup). Objects could alert me when it was time to get ridof them.

Spimes are what happens when the logic of networked data finishes colonising the physical environment. A society with spimes in it has transformed the means of production, design, distribution, maintenance, and disposal in a radical way.

As physical objects become close to trivially easy to create, we should expect their value to trend towards zero. Design in a spime-laden world is less about the care and feeding of physical objects and more about a relationship with time. Time is always in short supply, and a well-designed spime is something that will buy you more.

As long as we're considering the question of time, let's turn our attention to Sterling's problem, an inferno-causing drought that almost certainly has its roots in the changing climate. Any system of production that increases the likelihood of climatological disaster is terribly designed from a time-conscious perspective.

Yet, the implication of physical objects demoted to the same status as printouts is an increase in disposability and faster turn around time to obsolescence. Given that every cycle of product iteration means new exploitation of the environment, this seems like a perilous situation. The insight of Shaping Things is that this can be a feature, not a bug.

"There's a Dieter Rams style of timeless design for very time-limited objects," says Sterling. "There are many design critics who are very keen on that and I was trying to refute it. Why don't we go into a space where we get rid of things as quickly as possible? We can regard them as printouts and that's OK. As long as they're made of the same stuff, torn apart, and folded into the front of the production stream it doesn't matter how fast those cycles run."

The only way this works in the long run is if the stuff getting manufactured is as easy to dispose of as it is to make, and if we can stop spewing carbon into the air over the course of its lifecycle. The material responsible for the physical manifestation of spimes should be highly versatile when in use and yet easily mulched and converted back to raw material for the manufacture of new spimes. "We haven't found a material like this yet, but we haven't had much need for one either," Sterling says.

"The missing part is the garbage at the end of the trail. Nobody wants to go there because nobody's figured out how to make it pay."

As a species, we do not have a great track record here. Sterling describes the first quarries, where neolithic early humans shaped rocks into tools. The grounds are now archaeological digs, littered with unusable flakes of stone, some still sharp enough to slice your hand, 200,000 years later. We've been leaving behind hazardous waste since the start.

Image

Leandro Castelao

Words

Tim Maly

My laptop knows the exact location of every file and folder on its hard drive. It's barbaric that my house doesn't have a similar inventory of its contents

Shigeru Ban has used recycled cardboard tubes, his signature material, to build everything from shelters for earthquake victims to pavilions for luxury brands. As work begins on his replacement building for quake-damaged Christchurch Cathedral in New Zealand, he explains what he means by "temporary" architecture.

It sometimes seems that Shigeru Ban has a number of different architectural careers. There is the builder of experimental structures using unlikely materials, especially cardboard. Then there is the architect designing a steam of stylish modernist houses across the globe, or the Shigeru Ban who creates pavilions for luxury brands such as Hermès or Issey Miyake. At the same time however, there is also Shigeru Ban the activist, builder of emergency shelter in disaster areas all over the world. And this last aspect of his work means his career is at a crucial moment. After its chain of disasters earlier this year, his native Japan needs his talents more than ever before – in circumstances no one would wish for.

"This is a situation that we have never experienced," he says. "This mixture of the earthquake, tsunami and the nuclear problem – no one nation has experienced this." Ban is currently constructing emergency housing for Onagawa Town in eastern Japan, in the rubble and carnage left by the tsunami. It's a role he has previously performed in Sri Lanka, New Orleans, Haiti and other stricken places – in fact, disaster relief makes up a large part of his work, beginning in 1994 in the aftermath of the genocide in Rwanda. After seeing images of refugees freezing as a result of not being provided with the correct shelters, he decided to get involved. "I thought: we have to improve the shelter otherwise any medical care doesn't happen," Ban says. "I went to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees in Geneva to propose my idea and I was hired as a consultant for this project. That was the beginning." Since then there have been a steady stream of emergency projects, from simple partitions dividing up the space in halls where families have taken shelter, emergency structures for rapid deployment, to low-cost housing to replace that which is destroyed. Many of these projects are directly commissioned, but equally as often Ban simply takes his expertise to wherever it is needed.

The earthquake that devastated Christchurch, New Zealand, in February this year gave Ban an opportunity to work in a more substantial way in a post-disaster context; he was approached to build a temporary replacement cathedral for the city after the George Gilbert Scott original was badly damaged. The structure of the new 700-capacity cathedral will consist of a splayed A-frame made of cardboard columns, Ban's signature material, with a stained-glass facade to recall the rose window of the lost building. "They had a second earthquake in June and the cathedral was completely destroyed," Ban says. "After the first one, it was partially damaged. They thought they might be able to repair and re-use it but after the second earthquake, they gave up. The area of the downtown was totally closed." Ban's replacement will be builtat the edge of the "no-go" zone downtown. "In order to have some kind of memory and relationship, I used the geometry of the original cathedral for the new temporary cathedral," he explains, describing how the project starts to blur the boundaries between pragmatic, emergency structures and the more "architectural" world of cultural context and social meaning.

Indeed, the Christchurch Cathedral, designed to be used for at least 10 years, also starts to ask questions about the very notion of the "temporary" building. "There is no difference between temporary and permanent," Ban suggests. "The church I built after the Kobe earthquake, [in 1995], it was there for eleven years. Then it was donated to another disaster area in Taiwan and then it became permanent." To Ban, the very notion of the permanence of architecture is suspicious: "If a concrete building is made by the developer just to make money, it is always temporary because another developer will destroy it to build a new one. That's a huge waste. Temporary is not because of the structure. Temporary is just the purpose of the building." It's true that if there is one thread that links all of Ban's projects together it's a sense of ephemerality, from the recycled materials that go into the buildings to the ease with which they can be taken down and reused afterwards. Take his Japanese pavilion at the 2000 Hannover Expo, the cardboard and paper gridshell collaboration with Frei Otto which brought him world renown; "Normally the pavilions for an Expo are there for only half a year, then they dismantle them and they create alot of industrial waste. But my goal was not when the building was completed, but when it was dismantled. So I carefully chose the material and also the construction method in order to recycle or reuse the building material after it was dismantled. That was how I designed. Not to make the completed building, that was not the goal."

It's tempting to see in this "cradle-to- cradle" approach a possible method for building in disaster contexts, although Ban is doubtful: "If you wanted to reuse, you would have to separate the materials – the wood, the plastic and so on. It's impossible. If you see the amount of rubbish, you can imagine." That said, his work is not all just elaborate uses for recycled cardboard tubing: Ban has recently been getting involved in the use of shipping containers – a rather crowded field, ranging from trendy dockside flats which use the very objects that rendered the docks redundant, to "pop-up malls" that stuff boutique shops into containers on recession-hit development sites. Ban is not impressed by this kind of thing, however: "This is nothing new," he says. "Many architects have built buildings out of shipping containers. The inside of the container is a terrible space – made for things, not for people." Instead Ban uses the containers to create in-between spaces, using the boxes themselves for the very minimum of programme. This is visible in the emergency housing under construction in Japan, or in the "Nomadic Museum" a massive (and again temporary) art-space with walls created by containers stacked in a chessboard pattern with a roof supported by the ubiquitous paper tubes, which migrated from New York to Los Angeles to Tokyo. Ban's logic for using the container is again about reducing the waste of the building project: "I had to make a building to travel from country to country, city to city, because the container is an international standard, I can rent the same container anywhere in the world so that I do not have to transport them. I can rent them locally and temporarily for the exhibition period. The material is locally available anywhere. It just happens to be a container".

By now his architecture is beginning to sound like a 1960s dream come true; the mobile, plug-in, standardised "zoom" architecture that would eventually become the "style" of high-tech. But there are other projects in Ban's oeuvre that begin to stand out from this pragmatism; his recent Pompidou Centre in Metz, France, for example, is draped in a large drooping timber roof structure, all double curves and bespoke connections. Buildings like this one, or his recent Korean Golf Clubhouse seem to have far more in common with the extravagances of Gehry or Hadid than, say, Cedric Price, and the former are not exactly known for their efficiency. Ban is reluctant to accept that there is a contradiction, however; "For the construction, the preparing and cutting of timber, we take advantage of the most advanced digital machines – it's important, but the design doesn't depend on that." But this expressive, high technology timber work has its significant uses as well: the altogether more conventional "Tamedia" office building in Zurich – currently in construction – uses similar techniques to achieve an entirely timber structure, and it's not long before we return to the question of materials and their lifespans: "I think we have no choice," he says. "Concrete and steel are a limited resource, only timber is unlimited as a structural material. We have to use more timber – the timber that Europe is consuming is much less than the rate the trees are growing".

So across all scales and variations of building it all seems to return to questions of waste and efficiency for Ban. But does this mean that he's coming more into step with the "green" architecture movement? "I started using recycled paper and materials for buildings in 1986 when nobody was speaking about recycling or the ecology, the sustainable issue, which has become totally fashionable now. I started doing this because I don't like to waste things; it's not because of this fashionable movement." He seems keen to distance himself from the more "beard and sandals" stereotype of environmentally conscious architecture, and it's Ban's ability to apply the same approach across so many different types of project that sets him apart from others.

For example; which other "sustainable" architects have clients that are drawn equally from the worlds of art, fashion, politics and industry? But it's obviously an issue that he cares deeply about: "Architects' biggest interest is in ecology," he says. "They try to use technology even if the building becomes more expensive. The overall costs, the lifespan, costs more. It's a very important issue for us. People are more interested in using ecological technology commercially. Nobody talks about how to reduce the waste."

Image

Shigeru Ban Architects

Words

Douglas Murphy

I started doing this when nobody was speaking about recycling or ecology

Fresh Kills in Staten Island was once the largest landfill in the world, the dumping ground for nearly all of New York's rubbish. But slowly it is being decontaminated and High Line architect James Corner is turning it into a unique landscape of meadows, giant earthworks, creeks and grasslands – an urban wilderness three times the size of Central Park.

I'm standing on 150 million tonnes of rubbish. Fresh Kills landfill in Staten Island, New York City, fills 2,200 acres and, for many years, was the largest tip in the world. For half a century New York, the capital of consumption, threw all its garbage into its own backyard. The mounds of decomposing trash rose to nearly 70m, 25m higher than the Statue of Liberty. This rat-and-seagull-strewn expanse, a time capsule of the metropolis' detritus, heaped into piles by huge industrial diggers, was apparently visible from space with the naked eye.

Now, James Corner, the Mancunian behind the hugely successful High Line park (Icon 074) that snakes through the west side of Manhattan, is transforming Fresh Kills into a public park. Corner, a professor of landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania and a specialist in reclaiming abandoned post-industrial sites, won the commission in 2003, when his fledgling firm had only three employees, and reclamation work began in October 2009. "One of the biggest challenges is just the scale of the place," he tells me when we meet in his voluminous office just north of the High Line terminus. "You get this amazing sense of being in a reserve. It's been said that Fresh Kills is the best thing that's happened to Staten Island because if you hadn't had a dump here, you would now have shopping malls and development."

Renders show an Arcadian paradise in place of the dump – a grassy wilderness punctuated by picnic piers, kayak launches, bird hides, ball parks and playing fields, cycle paths, eco-looking concession stands and trash barges transformed into floating gardens. Small gateway projects on the periphery of the site – playgrounds and sports facilities, public relations exercises to get neighbouring residents on side – are due to open later this year. "It was always a bit of a joke if you came from Staten Island because that was where the dump was," Corner explains. "They lived with the trash trucks and barges coming and going each day. They've lived with the smell and the seagulls. To them, this is a nuclear bombsite. To be able to communicate to them a certain hopefulness, an optimism that you could build a beautiful landscape that would be clean and healthy, is something they're very sceptical about." It is hoped that South Park, which covers 425 acres of the site, will be safe for visitors by 2014. But the entire project is expected to take three decades. When it is finished it will be three times the size of Frederick Law Olmsted's Central Park.

credit AFP/Getty Images

Visiting Fresh Kills this summer with Eloise Hirsch, administrator of the new park, and Tatiana Choulika, associate partner at James Corner Field Operations, our New York City Parks Department jeep struggles to get up the rutted road that led to Fresh Kills's highest peak. "You can see Oz," Hirsch says when we finally reach the summit, gesturing towards the dramatic skyline 14 miles away, a mirage that rises above bright blue tidal inlets and the emerald forest of the Staten Island green belt. "It's the most incredible view of Manhattan, and we're still in New York City." To the east you can see the towers of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and the fountain-like tip of Coney Island's famous parachute jump. To the west is the heavily industrialised New Jersey shore. "That's where we're going to plant all the trees, to screen it off," Choulika jokes. To the south is a suburban housing development, closer to the former stench than you would have thought possible.

An adjacent mound is in the process of being capped, as this one has been, serviced by a procession of trucks. In its layered cross-section, you can clearly see the hidden engineering that goes into the rustication of the site: a layer of clay and an impermeable plastic membrane seals in the rubbish; this is covered with gravel, then two feet of pre-sod and six inches of topsoil, on which grass is seeded. There is also a liner under the garbage to create a closed drainage system. A gutter at the foot of the mound catches the leachate – the liquid gunge that is a byproduct of decomposition – so that it can be purified before it pollutes the estuary and waterways. The hill is dotted with wellheads to vent the methane that the bacteria consuming the garbage produce and which fills the vinyl membrane like a balloon ($1 million of gas is sold to the National Grid each month). The pipes hiss like kettles coming to the boil.

Engineers have to constantly monitor the mounds, which collapse like giant soufflés as they rot, so that there are no landslides, and they must continually crown the peaks with fresh soil so that no fetid lakes form there. "There's an amazing contrast," Corner says of this unique geography, "between the geometrically engineered, industrialised series of huge earthworks sitting upon a very sponge-like, dynamic, natural landscape of meadows, wetlands, tidal flats and creeks. There is something a little odd about the scenery – it's obviously not pastoral and natural. There is a slight melancholic feel to the place that I think is very charming and distinctive. It's not like anywhere else."

Corner compares working on a site that already has so much personality to plastic surgery. "Fresh Kills has a strange, sad beauty," he says. "We want to try and amplify that and build upon it rather than replace it with a conventional idea of what a park should look like, which is essentially the pastoral tradition of Central Park. There are so many other types of landscape expression and experience." Instead of coming up with a finished masterplan, Corner conceived of Fresh Kills as a time-based project. Rather than importing millions of tonnes of topsoil from faraway virgin sites, Corner proposed growing the park, planting organically rich grasses and ploughing them back into the ground every six months to manufacture enough new soil to allow a more bio-diverse range of plants to be grown. "We didn't design geometries and forms but rather a methodology for this big complicated landscape to come into a new sense of being," he says. "The idea was that we were going to be able to install a large range of meadows, woodlands and grasslands in what is now an ecologically bereft landscape. There's not a lot there."

The Fresh Kills wetlands first became a dump in 1948 when Robert Moses – the city parks commissioner who transformed New York more than any other (the press nicknamed him "Big Bob the Builder"), crisscrossing it with expressways and bridges and dotting it with parks – wanted to build a link over the Arthur Kill, a narrow stretch of water that separates Staten Island from New Jersey. Fresh Kills (Kill derives from the Dutch word for creek) seemed the ideal site to build the foundations. Irate residents were assured that it would only take three years to fill the land. In 1951, Moses requested more time, claiming the project was "at once practical and idealistic". It was, he said hyperbolically, the greatest land reclamation project ever attempted – he now hoped that it would house an industrial zone to the west with parks and housing to the east.

The site swelled; by 1954 it covered 669 acres; by 1966 it consumed 1,584 acres. By the early 1970s, when other landfills and incinerators in the city closed, it was receiving half the city's refuse.By the mid-1980s barges brought in nearly all New Yorkers' garbage: 650 tonnes in each load and 29,000 tonnes every day. The city employed 650 full-time workers to dispose of it. Massive powder-blue diggers at the waterfront piled the trash into huge wagons that were pulled by caterpillar trucks up to the landfill's active bank, or tipping point. "The smell was overwhelming," Eloise Hirsch remembers. "There were seagulls all over the place. But it was a really well-organised industrial operation."

In 1995, to thank the conservative-voting borough that had secured him the New York mayoralty (the first time a Republican had won in 30 years), Rudolph Giuliani agreed to close the site at the end of March 2001. He kept his word and the city's rubbish is now exported to other states, to an incinerator in Newark, New Jersey and landfill sites in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia and South Carolina. "The poor get it," Choulika says. "It costs us a lot more to ship it away than to dump it in our own backyard." (The New York City Department of Sanitation's budget is $2.2 billion dollars a year, nearly $400 million of which is spent on exporting waste.)

However, the day after 9/11, Fresh Kills opened again, when trucks and barges brought over the wreckage of the World Trade Centre. Construction workers nicknamed Ground Zero "The Pit", and Fresh Kills' West Mound, where 1.4 million tonnes of bent I-beams, crushed cars and other debris were deposited, was renamed "The Hill". FBI agents in white protective suits and masks sifted the remnants, looking for evidence and proof of identity (the debris was sifted down to a quarter of an inch). More than 4,200 human remains were found and they managed to identify 300 victims. On 31 July 2002, Fresh Kills closed for good.

"There are families who did not recover any body part of a family member and they believe that their blood, their DNA, their bones are here," Corner says. "To them it's an atrocity that these should be mingled in with a trash mound. So, politically, it's a very charged landscape." Eleven such families took their battle to have the World Trade Centre debris moved from the landfill to a cemetery all the way to the Supreme Court, where their appeal was turned down. They were not appeased by the suggestion that a park, containing a monument to the recovery effort, would rise, phoenix-like, from the ashes.

Corner, who is friends with Olafur Eliasson and, he says, takes inspiration from art that "elevates experience to the level of the extraordinary", has proposed a massive earthwork as a reminder of 9/11; a splayed evocation of the towers, as if they had toppled over rather than been crushed under the weight of their collapsing floors. Visitors would be able to walk the length of the two buildings, which would form a V and tilt up gently so that they aligned with the view of Ground Zero.

"They're very gentle grass slopes," Corner says, pointing to a site plan. "It's through walking up these buildings, which will take the average person about 20 minutes, that you get a sense of how big scale they really were. At the same time, when you stand back, you'll have a very empty horizon: no planting, no trees, just a massive geometrical line and a big sky. It's a pretty radical style that has nothing to do with the sentimental idea of pastoralism, on the one hand, or of memorialisation on the other. It has to do with inducing the sense of respect and reflection through movement and though emptiness."

This funerary moundwill be the last to be capped. By the time visitors are ableto walk Corner's massive work of land art, in about three decades time, the park will have completely opened. I watch a truck, spouting exhaust fumes, ascend its steep slope as a hawk circles carefully above.

It's quite a garden shed. When the city of Colchester held its architectural competition for an arts centre in 2003, it wanted to replace an outdated and dismal bus station east of the city centre. But architect Rafael Viñoly didn't care for the site, and suggested that the council build on a neighbouring plot adjoining the 18th-century gardens of a derelict manor house. The council was convinced. Now open, the Firstsite building snakes around the bottom of the D-shaped garden of East Hill House, a golden semi-circle like a chunk of pineapple. Viñoly reaches for another fruit to describe it – "a large banana".

Clad in a copper-aluminium alloy called Tecu Gold, the £28m arts centre has a mixed programme. Viñoly says it is a "difficult animal to define – it's really an energy centre, in a way". Firstsite, a local contemporary arts organisation founded in 1994, takes the main gallery space. There are "laboratories" for artists, a 190-seat auditorium and a home for the University of Essex's outstanding collection of Latin American art. The building also shelters the Berryfield mosaic, a Roman artwork discovered on the site in 1923, and a restaurant called Musa – gardener's Latin for banana.

The larger site meant the building could be kept to a single storey and simplified, unlike the two- or three-storey proposals for the bus station.

"It seemed to me to be an obvious move," says Viñoly. "When you look at the [other] competition entries, they all seem cramped because they are cramped."

To simplify the interior, the main gallery doubles as the primary circulation space, taking up most of the outer edge of the curve. However, this means that the main display wall of the gallery is not only curved, but also slopes outwards, making it a challenging space to hang pictures. Viñoly simply dismisses this concern. "I think the slope of the wall isn't that critical to displaying large pieces," he says.

Internal walls are not fixed, so the gallery spaces can be re-configured – as Viñoly puts it, the building can become "whatever it wants to be ... Somehow usage will influence how the site develops," he says. "All of this could end up being changed dramatically." This is plausible, but means that at present Firstsite's galleries feel provosional or ad hoc, and the axis generated by the symmetrical house and garden is ignored. Perhaps Colchester will take on the protean space Viñoly has part-created and impose an order and meaning on it. And the gold cladding is endearingly wacky. "The thing most people ask is, 'Why is it gold?'," Viñoly says, "and there's no real answer to that."

So what's the unreal answer, I ask.

"Well, why not?"

Image

Richard Bryant

Words

William Wiles

Internal walls are not fixed, so the gallery spaces can be re-configured. Somehow usage will influence how the site develops

Japanese design group Nendo's acrylic shelving unit will tidy your stuff while shattering it into pieces – using an intriguing optical illusion

Giving people a small '!' moment," is how Nendo describes the purpose of its designs. According to Akihiro Ito, a member of the Japanese design collective, that moment can translate into "happiness, fun, strange, sympathy, doubt, anger ... anything".

The group's Scatter Shelf is both practical storage system and optical illusion in one, constructed from thin black acrylic sheets in an irregular grid formation. The shelf is structurally strong, with the ability to support an array of objects, but its kaleidoscopic quality is what's most striking about it. When the system is viewed directly, objects stored on the shelves look as though they are caught in a spider's web. At an angle, the glossy opaque acrylic appears transparent and the objects look as if they're floating in mid-air.

What gives the Scatter shelf its name is the effect caused by the varying positions of its shelves and support. This splinters and scatters the reflections of objects placed in the unit in unexpected ways.

Oki Sato, Nendo's founder, initiated the concept of the Scatter Shelf by drawing a linear "manga-style" sketch. "With the assistance of one other designer, the concept was further developed in regards to shape, material and colour," explains Ito.

Since its formation in 2002, Nendo has become renowned for its inventive and stylistically quirky work. A recent solo show at the National Taiwan Craft Research and Development Institute featured a collection of furniture titled Thin Black Lines, presented within trompe l'oeil interiors.

Nendo's 16 members are now working on more than 100 different projects, including commercial interior spaces in Japan, China, Korea and Milan. A solo exhibition in Paris is set to open early next year.

Words

Ayesha Kapila

Image

Nendo/ Masayuki Hayashi

Nendo's founder initiated the concept of the Scatter Shelf by drawing a linear "manga-style" sketch

A primary aim for Henning Larsen Architects, when designing the Harpa Concert Hall in Reykjavík, Iceland, was for the building to "dematerialise" – for its facade to be "expressive and open, promoting the dialogue between the building, the city and the surrounding landscape".

It seems ambitious to attempt to be expressive and open, while being elusive and dematerialised at the same time. This is perhaps why the architect asked renowned artist Olafur Eliasson – best known for his 2003 Weather Project installation at Tate Modern – to design the facade (Icon 093).

Eliasson is concerned with the architectural relationships between people, nature and technology, but his work often focuses on the non-material sensations that his sculptures evoke: those of light, temperature, smell, taste or air. Some of his most physical works to date, such as the Blind Pavilion at the 2003 Venice Biennale or Quasi Brick Wall in Cadiz (2002), are spatial and structural responses to nature – and clear precursors to the Harpa facade.

Inspired by the geological formations of the region's coastal basalt rock, the geometric surfaces of the concert hall are constructed from steel and glass. The southern facade is a three-dimensional construct of twelve-sided crystalline panels – a re-imagining of the quasi-bricks used in his earlier sculpture in Spain. These elements consume and reflect the surrounding light.

As a result, the building is a reflective beacon. Conflicting angles and colours play with, distort and amplify the otherwise rather constant Icelandic environment – the dull blues and grey rocks of the harbour; the lingering watery daylight in summer and the permanent semi-darkness of the winter.

Eliasson manipulates the elements, playing with light and colour – sensations in which he is profoundly interested: "The fact that colour only materialises when light bounces off [an object] into our retina indicates that analysing colour is, in fact, about analysing ourselves," he says.

The effects continue inside the building. As project manager Osbjorn Jacobsen says: "One of our focus areas was the changing light and how the structure and coloured glass were reflected in the various spaces of the foyer."

The main concert hall has renowned acoustics and a surprising blood-red interior.

The architect surrounded the performance spaces -with a large, mixed-use public realm. Design director Peer Teglgaard Jeppesen says the aim of this space was to "connect to the city – to create synergy and interaction ... Harpa reaches out to the city and stands out as an active, luminous stage, where the interior of the building and city life are united," he says.

Harpa is all things to all men: regenerative beacon, natural phenomenon and connective urban space. Although its hulking, crystalline form and twinkling reflective surfaces do not lend themselves to "dematerialised" transparency, it does reclaim the urban realm and converse with its unique landscape.

Eliasson's glittering carapace, Jacobson says, allows visitors to "experience the city and surrounding landscape, through the distinctive facade and its changing expressions, as a continuously changing sense perception".

Image

Nic Lehoux

Words

Tom Wright

One of our focus areas was the changing light and how the structure and coloured glass were reflected in the various spaces of the foyer

Among the hills on the outskirts of the small town of Yusuhara, on the southern Japanese island of Shikoku, is the new Yusuhara Wooden Bridge Museum, designed by Kengo Kuma & Associates. Linking a spa and a hotel that sit on opposite sides of a road, the new building is a striking interpretation of the language of Japanese timber construction.

The bridge is entered from ground level on one side through a new building, while the other side, being 10m lower, is accessed via a glass lift. In between, the bridge is flanked on both sides by small workshop and gallery units, making the span both passageway and exhibition space. "The bridge would be worthy of being called a culture complex," explains Jumpei Matsushima, the architect in charge of the construction. "Exhibits for the gallery vary from artist to artist, but it mainly displays contemporary art, local arts and crafts, and the studio is used for education programmes for children."

The visual language of the building is remarkable, deliberately harking back to the "dougong" corbelled timber structures of ancient Japanese and East Asian architecture, while simultaneously making it appear weightless and out of scale. Where traditionally each column of the frame would be topped with a corbel, here there is a single column with the entire building appearing to rest upon it – the entire width is cantilevered off a series of timber beams. And although this central column is actually steel, and the trusses at either end of the building do in fact carry some of the load, the whole building appears to touch the ground very lightly indeed.

It's a very dramatic look, one which is as reminiscent of Arata Isozaki's Clusters in the Air metabolist urban fantasy (1960) as it is of traditional techniques. It also hints at the classic postmodernist manoeuvre of scaling up a single element into an entire building, a move begun by Adolf Loos in his 1922 Chicago Tribune competition entry. Kuma used it in projects from the early 1990s and it can most recently be seen in a building of similar conceit for the Chinese pavilion at the Shanghai Expo.

But it's not just aesthetic caprice that has led to the approach used here: "We wanted to prove that even on a site where large trees are less available, we can employ a traditional method where a big yet delicate cantilever can be realised with the assembly of small-sectioned materials," says Matsushima, and it's true that the building seems less of a pastiche when considered in its context halfway up a mountain valley, bridging between its traditional neighbours.

As Matsushima puts it: "The structure is a modern construction inspired by traditional techniques."

Everybody knows that you can make paper from wood," says Mieke Meijer. "But I thought it would be a nice idea to do the opposite, and try to make wood from newspaper." The Dutch designer's whimsical recycling project first came about while she was studying at Design Academy Eindhoven in 2003, but was left forgotten in a drawer until years later, when Arjan van Raadshooven and Anieke Branderhorst, from the design company Vij5, helped Meijer realise its potential as a sustainable material with real applications in design.

Meijer made the first Newspaper Wood planks by hand, through a laborious process of coating sheets of old newspaper with glue and tightly rolling them into thick logs. With special blades and tools, the logs were sawed, turned, milled and sanded. Finishing them with varnish or wax made the wood waterproof. Cutting into the log at angles exposed the artificial grain effect left by the ink on the old paper.

But producing the planks by hand had its limitations. "Any small area of sheet that wasn't coated with glue would leave a weak spot in the material," Meijer says. To industrialise the process, Meijer and Vij5 designed a bespoke machine that could compress and glue the paper with enough uniformity to make Newspaper Wood viable for large-scale production. "At the moment the machine is quite slow, only producing one or two paper rolls a day," says Meijer. "But with more testing and more machines we could start thinking about really large-scale production."

In Milan this year, Vij5 presented a collection of experimental Newspaper Wood objects, asking seven Dutch designers to work with and test the material in their own way. Projects like Floris Hovers' Press to Open (a cabinet resembling a small printing press) and Christian Kocx's Reading Light make use of existing woodworking techniques to explore the material's structural potential. Others emphasise the aesthetic quality of the grain: playful design duo rENs made a set of brass and wood jewellery inspired by the words and characters that can still be read from the layers of compressed newspapers. For Meijer "it's more of an aesthetic material". She says: "You can try to handle it like wood but you find that some things don't really work."

As with all new materials, there's still a lot of developing to do with Newspaper Wood. The planks are limited in span to the width of an open newspaper, making larger projects, such as Greetje van Tiem's writing desk, only possible by using the material as a veneer. Newspaper Wood's strength in use is also determined by the toughness of the glue; replacing natural glue with a chemical resin could improve this but would mean the product would no longer be biodegradable.

"There are still things we come across and we need to find solutions for," says Meijer. "We've thought about combining newspaper with real wood ... or using cardboard tubes that are made in spirals to get longer lengths," she says. The young designer is also aware that newspaper itself is becoming scarcer as a raw material. "Maybe in 10 years, we'll be unable to make this wood because we don't produce newspapers any more," she says. "We have to see. In the meantime, we're concentrating on how to enlarge the manufacturing process, and seeing if there's potential for this material in architecture too."

Image

VIJ5

Words

Riya Patel

Everybody knows that you can make paper from wood. But I thought it would be a nice idea to do the opposite

It took seven months and about as many designs to finalise the shape of this house in Tübingen, near Stuttgart. Creating a house for a family of six on a 365sq m plot is tough, but when the house has to duck and crease to maintain the neighbour's views of the local castle, it gets tougher. It also had to be built sustainably, to a tight €330,000 budget. Weaker spirits would have made their excuses.

"But that's the job of a good architect – to find a solution to restrictions," says Jan Theissen from Martenson und Nagel Theissen. "A good living space has nothing to do with lots of square metres. It has more to do with the relationship rooms have with neighbouring rooms, and with the outside."

Internal spaces overlap and connect with each other. The open-plan ground floor, for example, has a kitchen, dining area, balcony, and a mezzanine study and living room. In one space you can be inside or out, together or apart, up or down.

Tall, wide windows offering cinematic views – they take up most of the wall in the first-floor bedrooms – also make it feel bigger than its footprint. The stairs meander through the house rather than straight up and down – an idea borrowed from Austrian modernist Josef Frank who wrote in 1931: "The path that connects ... individual places within living spaces must be so varied that you never notice its length."

Outside, the roof and upper levels are clad with an inexpensive rubber waterproof membrane, folded at the edges to channel water off the building. The boxy pitch at the top mimics mansard-style roofs of neighbouring houses, while the ground floor is slightly elevated to keep space clear for a heat exchange system beneath the ground. Pipes buried just below the surface take air and naturally heat it before it enters the house (where it is heated again, using warmth extracted from stale air leaving the house). It helps to maintain an even climate inside year-round, without the need for heating.

But while technology makes the home more sustainable to run (it has achieved Passivhaus standard), Martenson und Nagel Theissen were equally interested in how architectural tricks could reduce its environmental impact. By designing a home that fits a large family comfortably into space that's about half the national average, they have shown that clever design can create more with less. And by providing separate access to the top floors via an external staircase, they have made it easy to split into two apartments in the future, ensuring it has a life after the kids move out.Theissen says, "Lots of houses are interesting in one thing. They might have a great facade, but the interior doesn't work. This house combines both with sustainability."

Image

Brigida Gonzalez

Words

Luke Tebbutt

A good living space has to do with the relationship rooms have with neighbouring rooms, and with the outside

Canterbury's new Marlowe Theatre comes as something of a surprise. It's an unexpectedly large and modern building in a historic city centre of winding, chocolate-boxy streets. Facing a new public plaza on a riverside site, Keith Williams Architects' building presents an austere two-storey colonnade to the city; a touch of New York's Lincoln Center in un-Manhattan surroundings of ancient priories and dinky little red-brick houses.

The Marlowe has existed in Canterbury since 1949 at various locations, but at last has a home worthy of its name, the playwright author of Faustus, who was born and schooled locally. The theatre previously occupied a converted 1930s cinema, which was demolished, along with a car sales lot, to make way for the new building.

As well as giving the theatre a healthy dose of civic dignity, Williams' concrete colonnade shades the glazed lobby and ties together the aluminium-clad main auditorium and a copper-clad box containing a smaller studio theatre. Above this rises another surprise – an aluminium- and mesh-clad flytower that is shaped into a spike. "Fly towers are not normally noted for being pointy, so this is a new kind of move, perhaps," Williams says. The fly tower addresses the cathedral, the city's outstanding historical and architectural feature, which dominates the skyline. "It's the biggest gig in town architecturally so we should acknowledge that," Williams says – but the Marlowe tower, which only reaches the ridge of the cathedral's nave, provides a new vertical landmark in a low-rise city.

There's further acknowledgement of the cathedral inside. A new, relatively tall building in the city centre, the theatre "creates" some views of the cathedral, most notably from the staircase and the first-floor bar. This view, over the rooftops of the city, was painted by artist John Doyle before the building was completed. The painting was auctioned to raise funds for the theatre, and sold for £5,000 to the actor Orlando Bloom.

The staircase itself is a handsome affair, its strong angles clad in black-painted plaster, which rises proudly through the lobby without dominating it. Williams describes it as a sculptural piece floating in the space, key to enjoyment of the evening. "The staircase should be a celebratory sort of thing," Williams says. "[It's] about procession, about moving; a part of going to the theatre is about showing off and seeing your friends, enjoying the whole pre-event spectacle. The staircase is part of that."

The rich walnut steps of the staircase also offer a foretaste of the main auditorium, which is clad in walnut strips – "a material I'm sort of in love with," Williams says. But what really grabs the eye in this impressive theatre space is the seating – 1,200 seats in three tiers, supplied by Poltrona Frau and upholstered in beautiful blood-orange leather. "It's one cow per seat, in case you're wondering," Williams says. "But the cows were going to die anyway." Here Williams – whose practice also produced London's Unicorn Theatre (2005), Wexford's Opera House (2008) and the remodelled Birmingham Rep – has pulled off a remarkable trick. The old cinema was narrow and deep, so while the new Marlowe offers 26 percent more seats, none of them are more than 25m from the stage. "We're wider, we're closer, more intimate than the old space," Williams says.

Image

Héléne Binet

Words

William Wiles

The staircase is about procession, about moving; a part of going to the theatre is about showing off and seeing your friends, enjoying the whole pre-event spectacle

La Maison des Champs-Elysées consists of two adjacent buildings which were recently joined together to form a hotel. Now that the hotel is under new management, it's the older and grander part – a 19th-century townhouse built for a Second Empire duchess – which has been redesigned by the Belgian fashion house Maison Martin Margiela.

Margiela left the house he founded in 2009, has famously never given an interview, been photographed only once (by accident) and labelled his clothes with a white rectangle bearing a black number (1 for womenswear, and so on). This commitment to minimalism and anonymity – employees are not to be named in interviews – continues, but the fashion house has now launched the obligatory perfume. It has also designed a couple of hotel suites (one for an exhibition at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris, the other a real suite in a spa in Bordeaux). In its first large-scale hotel project it has refurbished the reception, bar, smoking room and 17 suites and bedrooms, and was given a very open brief.

The colour scheme is white or black, or a black-and-white trompe l'oeil pattern based on the building's facade and the panels of the listed "golden salon" on the second floor. The results are mixed: strikingly elegant and minimal in some places, but overdesigned and oppressive in others. The white ground-floor bar is one of the most successful rooms. Here a series of Groupe sofas – a surrealist piece created last year with Cerruti Baleri, consisting of three armchairs wrapped in white linen and cotton – face each other across mirrored cuboid tables. The mirroring effect continues with a trompe l'oeil carpet and matching wallpapered ceiling.

One of the few specific elements of the brief was to create "a British character for the smoking room". The result, with its black, burnt-oak walls, dark brown leather armchairs, and lights set in black bottles is accurately oppressive; it's horribly like Black's Club in London, though more comfortable. The upstairs walls and carpets are also black, with overhead spotlights to guide you. The decor is at its silliest in the vampiric "Closet of Rarities" suite; in another "British" touch it has burnt-oak walls and black wool-pinstripe curtains. When my guide told me that some guests have changed their minds about spending the night there, it didn't seem surprising.

Maison Martin Margiela says that "many elements are part of our own universe". The white and trompe l'oeil areas are, like Margiela's clothes, the most attractive. In the white bedrooms, telephones are swaddled in linen (like the Groupe sofas), and you have to draw back linen covers to see the photographs lining the walls: a reminder of the veiled models Margiela showed in his first solo collection in 1989.

The restaurant and bar are both "in the French style"; it's tempting to think that the split decor tries to present Britain in the most unfavourable light possible.

The restaurant's armchairs seem to be "in levitation": they have hidden central bases so that their feet are off the floor.

Maison Martin Margiela plans to continue its adventures in interior decoration. As to future directions it says, "It is quite probable that we follow this path." It would be intriguing to know what its founder makes of this interesting but wildly uneven project.

Image

Martine Houghton

Words

Fatema Ahmed

Maison Martin Margiela says that "many elements are part of our own universe"

While sculptor Martin Boyce was studying at the California Institute of Arts in the mid-1990s, he noticed something strange. The furniture around him was changing – not physically, but in its "soul". Postmodernism had fallen from fashion, and the midcentury modernist revival was under way, with pieces by Jean Prouvé and Charles and Ray Eames in intense demand. "A lot of the work was being exhibited in furniture galleries and shown almost as sculpture," says Boyce. "They were often shown without a tabletop, for example, to reveal the engineering and the form of the metalwork and so they were almost changing as objects. The stories of these objects were changing."

At the same time, furniture that was designed for mass production was becoming a niche product favoured by the rich. "It is kind of hilarious if you open up an interiors magazine or Elle Decoration and every kind of super rich person in the world has the same sort of furniture ... The object itself sort of stays the same but somehow its kind of soul or its ideology has transformed through time and through its situation."

Thus Boyce, who has now been nominated for the Turner Prize, began a career-long interaction with modernist furniture. He takes the distinctive forms of Eames and Prouvé pieces and makes them his raw material. "It's not a remake, not an exact remake but it is very recognisable, that's what it is," he says – the design is "filtered through me". What emerges is troubled, fashioned in highly weathered galvanised steel. "It looks like it has been abandoned, left outside for a year or so ... There's rust on it." On these neglected frame are partial tabletops, roughly etched with words and symbols in a runic typeface designed by Boyce. The tables are at once familiar and distant – they are amnesiac relics, "undead", their meanings lost or distorted, new meanings imposed on them.

This attempt to defamiliarise the familiar extends beyond the great works of the modernist canon to the more humble objects in the street. "It seems to be where my eye goes, unloved, misused or disused pockets of landscape," Boyce says. "A lot of it is what you see from the train window or car window. These peculiar pieces of landscape ... They appear to be waste ground but they have a park bench and a bin and a tree, so then it's a park. Those moments and those objects that transform one place into another place; these things really fascinate me."

credit Keith Hunter

He lights his gallery spaces with curiously municipal concrete trees bearing fluorescent tubes, and deploys fencing materials to break up spaces. One object from a show in May, which will be used in the Turner exhibition, is three park benches, similar to the work of Prouvé or Perriand, upended on to their side and joined together to form a screen. "There's rusted streaks running down it and it looks like an abandoned object. It is this idea of one thing becoming something else and that you are physically looking through an object, at the space beyond it and the objects beyond it."

The intent, he says, is to "make places, rather than things". "The gallery space becomes a fragment of the landscape or fragments of different landscapes merged together," a fragmentary, melancholy experience that might connect with his interest in fleeting views from passing trains or cars: "When you see things for a split second, they can often – to me certainly – appear quite beautiful, quite often because there is a lonely, isolated sense of abandonment."

The Turner Prize exhibition opens at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead on 21 October 2011

credit Keith Hunter

Image

Stefan Altenburger

Words

William Wiles

The intent is to "make places, rather than things". The gallery space becomes a fragment of the landscape or fragments of different landscapes merged together

For the last two years the French designer Raphael Navot has been commuting between Paris and Los Angeles to work with the film director David Lynch on Club Silencio. It's named after the club in Lynch's 2001 film Mulholland Drive and Navot says his task was "to translate the scenography of David Lynch into design". Sometimes there was "a very clear description: a drawing, a sketch or a perspective"; at other times, "Lynch would describe a situation rather than give a description." Once the pair agreed on the details they had to find out if it was practical to turn their fantasy into floors and walls and furniture.

The real Club Silencio is in the Bourse district of Paris, in the basement of existing music venue the Social Club (they're under the same ownership). The private members' club is a 650sq m space which has been divided into a series of spaces arranged around the central bar: a live stage, cinema, art library, lounge and smoking room, the latter complete with floor-to-ceiling bamboo "trees" which have ashtrays placed at points along their trunks.

Particular care has been paid to doorways: each one, Navot explains, asks you to "cross a frame into another space", and each space is expanded in turn through the use of mirrors.

The walls of the lounge are covered in wooden cladding blocks which have been painted in gold leaf by Ateliers Gohard – the firm which maintains all the gilding at Versailles. Navot says, "I think gold has a bad reputation. We tried to get away from the old associations." In fact, there's no paint in the club at all; so when there aren't mirrors, it's all gold or brass leaf, which feels as luxurious as it sounds – aristocratic even.

The bar, with its reflective copper surfaces, feels almost steampunkish; Navot confirms that they wanted to create "a nostalgic future". In Mulholland Drive, what the two main characters find at the club calls into question everything we think has happened earlier. It's a disturbing (but exhilarating) atmosphere, one that its real-life namesake has chosen not to copy in every detail.

Image

Alexandre Guirkinger

Words

Fatema Ahmed

I think gold has a bad reputation. We tried to get away from the old associations

As London's Olympics project heaves itself towards completion, the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen has hosted the 2011 Universiade, a biennial student athletics competition and the world's second-biggest multi-sport event. Central to the games, which took place in August, was the complex of sporting venues, designed by German practice GMP Architekten.

The venues are situated by a lake under a forested hill, in the city's eastern Longgang district. The three main buildings are a 60,000-capacity athletics ground, an 18,000-capacity indoor sports hall and a 3,000-capacity swimming pool. All feature a triangulated, jewel-like design language, with the liquidity of the landscaping elements set off against the buildings' mineral character.

"The gentle, soft shape of the landscape and the precise crystal shapes of the buildings create a dialogue that relates to traditional Chinese gardens and parks," says Stephan Schütz, the partner in charge of the project.

The strategy of folding the building surfaces increases their rigidity and thus the overall efficiency of the structures, which vary from a rectangular shed for the swimming facility to the bowl-shaped athletics ground.

Unlike the deep trusses of a typical stadium, these folded gems are consistently shallow. They are constructed with double skins – glass on the outside, membrane on the inside -– which gives a milky, diffuse character to the light inside and means that their skins, dull grey under the sun, appear to glow into the night.

This approach also has a functional benefit. "The space between the two envelopes is naturally ventilated, so a comfortable indoor climate is produced," says Schütz. "This is the first stadium complex in the world to use ventilated envelopes, but I believe that this technology will be used more often in the future, especially in countries with extremely warm climates."

GMP is one of Germany's biggest architectural practices, and stadiums are one of its specialities – the firm has just completed another venue in western Shenzhen, and has others rising in Poland, Romania, Brazil and Slovenia. These range from conventional designs to more outlandish efforts, such as the Universiade complex, with its hints of Frei Otto and contemporary digitalia.

Compared with the London Olympic site, the Universiade complex – with its unified masterplan and single architect – is a more integrated landscape, but it also raises the question of what to do with the site now that the games are over. None of the stands are demountable, but they will be given new uses: the swimming pool will become public; the indoor arena will be used as a concert and conference venue; the stadium will be a training centre; and the surroundings outdoor space will be used as a public park.

And with the continued growth of Shenzhen – including its imminent amalgamation into the 42 million-strong Pearl River Delta megalopolis – it seems likely that the site will be well used.

Image

Christian Gahl

Words

Douglas Murphy

The gentle, soft shape of the landscape and the precise crystal shapes of the buildings create a dialogue that relates to traditional Chinese gardens and parks

Nature and science are integral to my design process, and these are some of the things that inspire, stimulate and uplift me. I appreciate the technical detail of design and find pleasure in making sense of how things work

TIVAN Dining ChairArik Levy for Molteni & CFor a long time I've wanted to make a comfortable, good-looking dining chair. It's not easy as these characteristics are sometimes in contradiction with one another. When I sat on the first prototype of Tivan, I closed my eyes and I was pleased; it felt as good as it looked. When it's next to a table its forms are defined and all the fine details we have been working on come to life.

Self Drilling ScrewsThis has changed things a lot for me. I love it. Not having to stop, change tools, drill before you screw and so on has made DIY much easier and more fun. I admire problem-solving design and integration of solutions into everyday objects.

NatureNature is by far our best living designer and is a guide to learn from and study from every day. Designs like this put us in scale and I love them.

SurfboardsA twin-tip, a directional board and a long board are what I like best ... not only for the great design and shape, but also because they make every single day of my vacation a great day!

BowlErnst GamperlErnst Gamperl's work is outstanding and Ernst is inspiring and motivating to watch. Spending time in his workshop and seeing him dance between self-invented machine and handmade finishing is like being in a fairy-tale. I own this piece in olive-tree wood. There's a fabulous contrast in texture between the inside and outside.

Image

Surfboards

Words

Arik Levy

Nature is by far our best living designer and is a guide to learn from and study from every day